Who Stands Between Women and Political Office in Sub-Saharan Africa

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Sub-Saharan Africa holds some of the highest percentages of women in parliament in the world. However, while these numbers are encouraging, they mask continental variation, stagnation, and, most importantly, the challenges women have in accessing and utilizing political power across the continent. This panel brings together a diverse set of scholars to look at the various actors that women candidates must interact and negotiate with in order to gain political office and legislate in Africa – voters, aspirants, party gatekeepers, and dictators. Johnson investigates why Benin lags behind other African countries in the proportion of women in elected and appointed political office. Drawing from over 100 interviews, she argues that democratization in Benin may have occurred “too early” before strong norms of women’s inclusion and quotas had emerged on the continent. Further, while the cost and competitiveness of elections have increased, women experienced legal discrimination in matters of family and finance until the early 2000s. Kang and Kroeger examine the gender dynamics of authoritarian cabinets to shed new light on whether and how dictators use women as tokens or wielders of influence. They argue that women are more likely to hold prestigious ministerial portfolios in party regimes than in personal regimes. Further, they expect the tenure of women ministers to vary based on both power status and regime type. They test this theory using a new data set on more than 6,000 ministers in 37 African dictatorships between 1976 and 2010. Michelitch and Sabherwal analyze individual-level data in Uganda, where reserved seat women hold 33% of legislative seats in subnational government, to understand why some citizens favor expansion or elimination of reserved seats. They hypothesize that citizens are more likely to favor a greater percentage of reserved seats if they: hold less traditional values about women’s leadership, engage more with RS-women, prioritize women’s service delivery issues, I perceive elections as performing well, and see value in RS-women for female citizens’ representation. In doing so, this study illuminates an understudied area --- citizens’ public opinion regarding such institutional change. Lastly, Phillips looks at the challenges women face during candidate selection in Zambia. Phillips shows, through a national survey experiment, that women face higher expectations from party gatekeepers to demonstrate their qualifications. Specifically, women candidates face greater cost in competing for nomination because they must visibly display desired attributes that are otherwise assumed of for male candidates. Collectively, they present work from multiple regions of the continent, with single-case analyses in both anglophone and francophone countries alongside an impressive cross-national analysis. Methodically, they pursue multi-method research, demonstrating novel and robust quantitative and qualitative work. In total, they form a comprehensive panel, well suited to further the discourse and understanding of the challenges women have in accessing and utilizing political power in Africa.

Sub Unit

• Division 53: African Politics

Individual Presentations

• The Burden of Proof: Barriers to Women in Party Controlled Candidate Selection - Melanie Lauren Phillips, University of California, Berkeley

• Women and Power in Authoritarian Cabinets in Africa - Alice Kang, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Alex Kroeger, Texas State University

• Explaining Public Opinion towards Women’s Reserved Seats in Uganda - Kristin Grace Michelitch, Vanderbilt University; Rashi Sabherwal, University of Pennsylvania

• Women’s Underrepresentation in Benin: The Downsides of Early Democratization - Martha C. Johnson, Mills College

Chair

• Alice Kang University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Discussant

• Amanda Clayton Vanderbilt University